Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and p...

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and u...

Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North A...

Johann Christoph Friedrich (later: von) Schiller, was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and dramatist. During the last several years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous...

German poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, and natural philosopher, one of the greatest figures in Western literature. Throughout his life Goethe was interested in a variety of studies and pursuits. He made important discoveries in connec...

Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was a celebrated Venetian playwright and librettist, whom critics today rank among the European theatre's greatest authors. His works, along with those of the modernist Luigi Pirandello, include some of Italy's most fa...

Jean Racine was a French dramatist, one of the "big three" of 17th century France (along with Molière and Corneille), and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition. Racine was primarily a tragedian, though he did w...

John Dryden was an English poet, dramatist, and critic. He first came to public notice in 1659 with his Heroic Stanzas, commemorating the death of Oliver Cromwell. The following year, however, he celebrated the restoration of Charles II wit...

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, was a French theatre writer, director, stage manager, actor, and all-around man of theatre, one of the masters of comic satire. The son of an interior decorator, Jean Baptiste Poquelin los...

Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac was a French novelist, playwright, epistolarian and duelist. A bold and innovative author, his work was part of the libertine literature of the first half of the seventeenth century. Today he is best known...

Jan Six was an important cultural figure in the Dutch Golden Age. The son of a well-to-do merchant family Six, Jan studied liberal arts and law in Leiden in 1634. He became the son-in-law of the mayor of Amsterdam, Nicolaes Tulp, in 1655, w...

Gerbrand Adriaensz Bredero is considered the major Dutch poet of his generation, particularly for his spontaneous love sonnets. The first Dutch master of comedy, Bredero was an important innovator; he drew upon classical elements as well as...

Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft - Knight in the Order of Saint Michael - was a Dutch historian, poet and playwright from the period known as the Dutch Golden Age. Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, often abbreviated to P.C. Hooft, was born in Amsterdam...

Christopher Marlowe, English dramatist and poet. Probably the greatest English dramatist before Shakespeare, Marlowe was educated at Cambridge and he went to London in 1587, where he became an actor and dramatist for the Lord Admiral's Comp...

William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His exta...